As the riots and flames die down around the country, the causes for such an explosion of violence are being explored. The prevailing theory seems to be that an uneducated, impoverished, disenchanted, criminal minority from single-parent families rose up to show the rest of us what’s what.
First up, let’s be clear, the reports of poverty have been greatly overstated. As we have seen. many of the looters had jobs. Also, in many areas where there is greater and more widespread poverty, little or nothing happened. Most looters were wearing designer clothes and used their BlackBerries and other smartphones to instigate and organise their attacks. On the most part they stole things they would want: televisions, more designer clothes and shoes and phones. They did not, on the whole, steal food or destroy high end items as a protest against feckless consumerism. This was the smash and grab materialism that is the product of the last thirty years of Western politics and culture.
After years of cuts and societal and community disbandment under Thatcher, a new approach and political culture was required. New Labour introduced the minimum wage whilst educational spending rose dramatically, but the culture never changed. People at the top did not and do not have to pay fair and just taxes, simply look at the furores over non-doms and private equity taxation. I am not pretending that this in any way motivated these senseless riots, but as Peter Oborne has poignantly suggested in his Telegraph column “the moral decay of our society is as bad at the top as the bottom.” For people like Boris Johnson and David Cameron to criticise looters for their “sense of entitlement” sounds suspiciously like the call a pot might make to a kettle.
People’s anger at MPs expenses, Lord Ashcroft’s, amongst many others, tax evasion and the Etonites they see in government is an impotent rage because most have accepted there is nothing they can do. Political life and influence seems beyond most and even then there is a deep feeling nothing can be done about the media, politicians and corporations most decent people abhor. There is also a sense of fear and loathing of those individuals we have seen rioting and killing innocent citizens attempting to protect their communities.
This and previous governments must be held to account for this feeling. By ignoring legitimate protests against the closures of mines, tuition fees and the Iraq War, they set a depressing tone and showed a startling arrogance that hundreds of thousands of voices could be ignored. The last protest I remember working was against the Poll Tax, but again I am not comparing these legitimate protests with what we have seen this week. I am only suggesting that there is a growing restlessness, malaise and nihilism that affect the whole country, not just looters.
There are no simple answers but at the centre of people’s reaction to these riots has been anger tinged with political apathy and defeatist acceptance. People are gathering to protect and clean up their neighbourhoods, but they are not engaging politically. Indeed Ken Livingstone has been called “politically opportunistic” to suggest cutting teenagers’ sports, school and youth clubs may in some way be aiding the rise of a bored, detached and uncontrollable ‘underclass’.
I do not believe that public spending cuts have contributed in any real way to these riots, but without libraries, clubs and a properly funded and active Social Services, it is inevitable that they will not be a one-off. It will destroy communities, not rebuild them. The Big Society has always been a big con, but we are getting a glimpse at its inevitable, nihilistic conclusion.
There are problems with injustice and inequality, of course there are, but I do not agree that they were the overriding reasons for these riots. People did it because they realised they could quite possibly get away with it. We should be clear that these people are far more privileged than most of the world’s seven billion citizens.
People in Somalia and Burma, for example, would trade everything for the (at least the opportunity for) wealth, freedom and education these rioters have been afforded. We should examine the injustice in our society, but we should not get too involved in believing the people responsible for looting are seriously impoverished. An immigration swap with Somalia may just show some of those rioters a new perspective on their ‘hardships’, for them and us. Ultimately a cultural and political shift is essential or else these riots may become recurrent rather than an repugnant one-off.
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